


Coulson's Final Case

by tisfan



Series: Imagine Clint and Coulson prompts [9]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Police, Bartenders, Drinking, Homicide, M/M, Murder, dirty cops
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-09-07
Packaged: 2018-12-12 15:34:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11740005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tisfan/pseuds/tisfan
Summary: The murder of a bike-messenger sends Homicide Detective Clint Barton looking for help in unexpected places...





	1. The Cold Open

**Author's Note:**

> Paperdollkiss asked for Phil as a barista/chef/diner owner/baker (whichever you like) and Clint is a Detective of some sort.

“You’ll want a little stain remover on your pants, let it soak in a bit, then rinse with cold water, before you wash them,” Phil said.  

“Yeah?” Clint threw himself down on the barstool.

“Bike chain grease, right?”

“Can’t get one by you,” Clint said. “Gimme a beer.”

“You off duty, Detective Barton?”

“S’just Clint, right now, Phil,” Clint said. He dropped his elbows on the bar and then propped his chin on the scarred and stained surface. “The Detective, he’s back at… at the station, fillin’ out paperwork, like a good little public servant.”

Phil laughed, like he was supposed to. And got Clint a beer; his usual, whatever was cheapest.  Phil was pretty sure that even on a detective’s salary, Clint could afford better beer. He just didn’t like it enough to spend money on. Now, Clint’s morning coffee… that could fund a nice sized nest egg. Clint drank most of the calories he needed for his job in coffee… the rest of it was stale doughnuts and pizza.

Phil used his thumb to pop the cap off the beer. It was a show-off move, but Clint didn’t even look.

And on a few, very rare, occasions, Clint would come in for a whiskey. The anniversary of his divorce. When his partner had gotten killed saving a kid’s life in a gang-shootout.

Usually it was just beer, though, and a quiet place to drink it.

Clint stared at the glass of beer, the bubbles crawling up the side, the lackadaisical head that was quickly fading into a scrim of foam at the top. “Citywide Special, yeah?”

Phil’s eyebrow went up and he poured a shot of house whiskey, cheap and pungent. “Bad case?”

Clint was in homicide. He was considered one of the best; his eye for detail earned him the nickname Hawkeye. Every day he worked was presumed to be a bad day for someone, at least.

“Almost typical,” Clint said, dropping the shot into the beer and drinking about half of it in one heroic pull. The shitty beer frothed a little as he dropped the glass back to the bartop with a shudder. “That was horrible.”

“Don’t talk trash about my beer, Clint,” Phil chided him.

“Ain’t trash if it’s truth,” Clint responded.

“I think you’ll find that it’s more trash when it’s truth,” Phil responded. He picked up a glass and wiped it. It didn’t need to be cleaned, but there weren’t any other customers at the bar, Daisy had the floor under control, and Phil often found that a bartender hovering put people off their drink. Made them feel judged, somehow. And it was always good to practice, make sure he had the pressure under control.

“Maybe so,” Clint said. He ran his finger around the edge of his glass idly, then took another swig. The shot glass rattled fitfully in the bottom of the glass.

“Would it make you feel better to talk about it?”

Clint scoffed. “Feel better? Shit, no. Technically, ain’t even allowed to. It’s all very hush-hush, back alley dealings, dirty money, dirty cops stuff. Can’t risk the press getting wind of it before we got a lid on it. Thin blue line, you understand.”

“I do understand that,” Phil said. “But you’re not Detective Barton right now, are you, Clint? You’re just a man, with a friend, who’s got an ear if you need to talk.”

Clint licked his lip, slow, then finished the rest of his beer. “Let’s do this again.”

Phil poured another shitty beer and put a shitty shot of whiskey next to it. “One more and I’ll have your keys, Clint.”

Clint shoved them over without hesitating. “You’re a good man, Phil, you know that?”

“I’m a good bartender, at least.”

“So, hypothetically, if I was to tell you that a bike messenger got shot today, fuckin’ executed, what would you say to that?”

“Anyone I know?”

“Yes.”

Phil closed his eyes for a moment. “Pietro Maximoff.”

“Pour yourself one for our good friend, Quicksilver.”

Phil did pour himself one. But unlike Clint, he wasn’t a heathen and he didn’t drink shit, even in his own bar. He dug under the bar until he came up with a bottle of Hakushu. “Sure I can’t interest you in something a little nicer than turpentine?”

“Nah.”

“To Pietro.” They drank. “How’s Wanda taking it?”

“Fuckin’ out of her mind,” Clint said. Stupid question.

“Who shot him?”

“Don’t know,” Clint said. He took a coin out of his pocket and spun it on the bar. The silver gleamed under the dim lighting. “Only guesses.”

“Yeah?”

“You know I’m between partners.”

Since Striker had been killed, six years back, Clint had gone through at least eight partners. No one wanted to work with him. Human disaster, his last partner, Kate Bishop, had called him, when stating she would absolutely eat her service piece before going back into the field with him. She was partnered with Chavez now. It was better for everyone. Clint was… reckless.

“That’s not news.”

“Our friend the bike messenger was on his way to the New York Bulliten with a package for Christine Everhart. Code. But we all know the handwriting.”

Phil’s eyebrow went up.

“Fury?”

“You always were good with the guesses.”

Captain Fury had been head of the precinct until last year. He took four bullets in the chest and retired very quietly. There were rumors that his retirement came at great duress, and that his family had been threatened. Fury was digging into a ring of dirty cops. But his list, his evidence, that had gone missing.

“Where’s this package now?”

Clint shrugged. “You’re the one with good guesses.”

“What are you gonna do now?”

“Buckle down. Try to survive. Find the guy who shot Pietro and left his body on the street like so much trash.”

Phil gave Clint a cold, hard smile. “You came here tonight for a reason.”

Clint raised the last of his beer in a toast. “Was wondering if you might want to come out of retirement for one last case.”

Phil flexed his prosthetic hand. He’d been retired. It’d taken him almost two years to learn to use it. And then… he had gotten a little soft. Gotten used to people _not_ shooting at him. “You know, I was gonna go to Tahiti for vacation this year.”

“I hear it’s a magical place,” Clint suggested. “But… Fury. And you. And Pietro.”

“Fuck Tahiti.”

“Good to have you on board. Partner.”

 


	2. Killing the Messenger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint is on the case

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to be doing these as a series of little ficlets, following the general outline of countless cop procedural shows on TV... consider each chapter to be "between the commercials"

_12 hours earlier_

Grant Ward was sitting on the edge of Clint’s desk; coffee mug in one hand with a half a donut slowly turning into sludge in the bottom of the cup. He did that on a regular basis; both the sitting and the sludging. Both things made Clint absolutely apeshit crazy, but he never said anything. He was odd man out at Shield.

“So, this woman, she’s got a whole heap of paperwork with her, and Judge Stern says, ‘so, you’re speaking on behalf of your father, who couldn’t make it in to court today,’” Ward said. “‘Mind telling us why that is?’”

“Because he’s dead,” Jemma Simmons muttered, not looking up from her tablet. Her partner, Leo Fitz, was hanging on Ward’s every word. As the department’s forensics and tech branch, neither of them saw much in the way of action, and Ward encouraged Fitz’s idolization to no end.

“Well, she says, well, he’s six feet under and just couldn’t make it today,” Ward said. “Stern puffs out, ‘You mean, he’s dead?’”

“It’d be murder, if he wasn’t already dead,” Jemma continued. She thumbed through her notes, then waited, ill-concealed impatience on her face.

“Turns out, the guy’s been dead for _ten years,_ they sold his car after the funeral, and no one had heard anything about the car until it came up for this speeding ticket; she had several copies of letters where she tried to tell the courts that. You shoulda heard Stern lecture everyone from the bailiff on down about wasting the court’s time -- he went on and on… eventually, he realizes that he’s wasting this poor woman’s time, who’s there with paperwork about dead ol’ dad…”

Clint scooched around the roadblock known as Detective Grant Ward and grabbed his battered purple coffee mug. “Why do you let him do that?” he asked Jemma in passing.

“What? Tell the same story I told three days ago that no one listened to?”

“I was listening,” Clint said. He had to admit, Ward really got into his storytelling; voices and the reenactment of key scenes, but Clint knew. Jemma was the one who’d been there, who’d told the story to a completely not-listening Fitz. The only time Jemma had Fitz’s attention was when they had a particularly knotty problem to work out, and then FitzSimmons happened, where they were finishing each other’s sentences and talking with some sort of hive mind.

“Barton!”

Whatever Jemma was going to say, Clint missed it, as Captain Jeffrey Mace stuck his head out of his office and bellowed across the bullpen. Clint looked mournfully into his empty coffee cup, then sighed. “Coming, Captain.”

Jeffrey Mace’s office was tight, and Mace himself filled out more than half of it. The man was broad -- shoulders like a linebacker and a face like the broad end of a shovel with square, perfect teeth, and a wide, perfect smile. Dealing with him always made Clint feel a little like he’d been hit in the face with a shovel, too. There was just… too much about the man, and it was especially too much before coffee.

Clint went to lean in the doorframe, his customary spot that kept him from feeling like Mace was breathing too much of his air, but the captain gestured him in further. “Come in,” he said, pointing to a chair. Clint rolled his eyes, but dropped into it. “I want you to take lead on the case that Chavez and Bishop have; they’re with the body down on Decatur and Malcolm X.”

Clint didn’t even try to conceal a groan. Taking over a case from Chavaz and Bishop was like… he didn’t even know. There were no SAT words to cover what a bad idea that was. “You know Katie-Kate said she would eat a bullet before working with me again, right?”

“Tell her to get her whole head in front of the shotgun. Preferably over a tarp. Otherwise, stop whining and get this solved,” Mace said. “This… this could be very big, Barton.”

“You’re sure you want me on it?” It’s not that Clint was a bad detective. He was actually a pretty damn good one, but he wasn’t political in the slightest, and the cases that made the newspapers with his name attached to them tended to be ugly, messy piles of shit.

Mace gave him a very direct glance. “I trust you.”

Clint sighed.

“And a team that trusts…”

“--is a team that triumphs,” Clint finished. “Right.”

***

“You got here fast,” Kate Bishop said. She had her sunglasses pushing back her long hair and handed him a cup of coffee as soon as Clint arrived at the scene.

“Someone told him you had a coffee for him,” America Chavez said.

“So, what do we got?” Clint asked. He took a sip; lukewarm, but at least it was drinkable. He’d cope.

“Oh, can I tell him about it?” Kate asked, bouncing on her toes.

“By all means,” Chavez said. She raised up the tape and Clint ducked under, glancing over the crime scene, letting his mind drift. That was his biggest advantage. Clint noticed things. It was what he was famous for -- Hawkeye, the guys called him sometimes -- and he did it best by pretending to listen to other people, by just absorbing the scene. He’d once watched that terrible BBC version of Sherlock, with all the little labelling tag on the screen, and while he’d liked almost nothing else about the show, that had resonated with him.

Only with him, they were more like sticky notes with unreadable handwriting on them. He’d know something was important for hours before he could make heads or tails of _why_.

“So, our vic here was pulling a Kevin Bacon in _Quicksilver_ ,” Kate said, “when all the sudden, WHAP, a masked dude pulls up to him and doors him. Accident, you might think, but…”

“Wait, Quicksilver?” Clint strode across the site and all but shoved Tony Stark into the gutter. The medical examiner straightened, coughed pointedly, but Clint ignored him.

“Pietro Maximoff,” Tony said, brushing his jacket off when it became clear that Clint wasn’t going to apologize. “I think you knew him.”

Clint swallowed hard. Didn’t see that one coming. “Yeah,” he said, roughly. “Yeah, I knew him.” He turned a glare on Kate. “Give me the short version; with some respect.”

Kate jerked her chin at him. “It wasn’t an accident; after the guy in the sedan doors him, he jumps out, wearing a mask, and shoots your friend in the back of the head. Grabs the messenger bag and drives off.”

“Witnesses?”

“Several,” America said. “Couple of ‘em managed to get the plate number, too.”

“That seems like cheating, somehow,” Kate said. “It’s gonna take us all of ten minutes to track this bad boy down.”

“Except…” one of the unis finished waving down and chatting with America, “the car was reported stolen almost six hours ago. Someone planned this.”

“Well, of course they did,” Kate said.

“A masked man, a stolen car, a dead bike messenger,” America said, tapping on her chin. “Someone wanted what was in that bag.”

“Call the delivery company, I want to know everything they know about that delivery,” Clint said. “And someone find me our vic’s address; his sister’s… I don’t want her finding this out from a stranger. I’ll do the notification.”


End file.
